Bay Area man sentenced to life for strangling man to death with dog choke chain during robbery

A 29-year-old Vallejo man will spend the rest of his life behind state prison bars for a 2018 murder and robbery in a Vallejo motel.

During a Monday afternoon hearing in Vallejo, Solano County Superior Court Judge John B. Ellis sentenced Devonte Levan Hicks to life without the possibility of parole for killing Gerardo Suarez-Marin.

No victim impact statements were read at the 1:30 p.m. sentencing in Department 23 in the Justice Building. However, Suarez-Marin’s wife provided a written statement to the court but requested that it not be read aloud, Deputy District Attorney Bill Ainsworth, who led the prosecution, told The Reporter.

Defense attorney Cate Beekman asked Ellis to reconsider and reduce the sentence but the judge denied her request, citing the nature of the crime, noted Ainsworth.

In the meantime, Hicks, who remains in the Stanton Correctional Facility in Fairfield, awaits transfer to the California Department Corrections and Rehabiitation.

A jury after nearly two days of deliberations following a three-week trial, determined on May 8 that Hicks was guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree robbery, a special circumstance.

The panel of seven men and five women also found that Hicks, a previously convicted felon, did not use a deadly or dangerous weapon during the killing and robbery.

During her closing argument in early May, Beekman revealed that Hicks used a dog choke chain to strangle and kill Suarez-Marin, 24, after Hicks sought to buy some marijuana from him at the Enterprise Drive motel.

His co-defendant in the case, Jessica Marie McCraven, 38, also a previously convicted felon and also from Vallejo, pleaded to lesser charges on April 4. As part of the plea deal, she testified against Hicks at trial on April 23. She was sentenced on June 6 to 12 years in state prison for her involvement in the crime. Her statements were a major factor in Ainsworth’s prosecution of the case.

Beekman sought to weaken the DA’s case by noting McCraven had two identity theft cases pending against her “and stole from her own mother two weeks before the murder.”

Also, there was no evidence of what specifically happened in the motel room, she asserted, adding that Ainsworth had not proven his case “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Referring to Hicks, she noted he was 22 at the time of the killing, calling him “intellectually disabled” and a person who used drugs. She described McCraven as “a manipulator and a liar,” with assertions that her client’s alleged control of McCraven “was not supported by the evidence.”

In a particularly dramatic moment, Beekman retrieved the choke chain, similar to one used for a dog, from an evidence bag and demonstrated how it worked. Pulled a certain way, she said, it doesn’t release. Suarez-Marin, she said, then “went unconscious” after being choked and Hicks and McCraven left the motel room.

In his rebuttal statement, Ainsworth told jurors much of the evidence was corroborated during the trial, including that Hicks was aware that Suarez-Marin “had a lot of money,” $10,000 in cash, in his possession at the time of the killing.

Hicks, he said, “kept all the money” and some of it was found on him at the time of his arrest on Aug. 22, 2018, in the 1000 block of Admiral Callaghan Lane. A short time later the same day, police officers arrested McCraven in the 900 block of that roadway.

Additionally, after the killing and robbery, the evidence showed Hicks and McCraven bought clothes, shoes, and smartphones. Hicks,  Ainsworth added, had a gun “while they were arguing” at one point, and, thus, McCraven’s testimony was true, he told jurors.

It was also true that McCraven was scared of Hicks, for she saw him choke Suarez-Marin, he said. While he spoke, Ainsworth earlier had positioned behind the witness stand and near the jury box a poster-sized color photo of the victim lying dead on the floor of the motel room, a photo apparently taken by Vallejo police investigators.

The evidence, Ainsworth reminded the jurors, showed that McCraven was in front of Suarez-Marin and Hicks was behind him during a struggle.,

“There were three people in the (motel room) and two left,” said Ainsworth, whose arguments prevailed in the jurors’ minds.

The case had been subject to a series of delays in the past six-plus years, due in part to reduced court operations and state and county public health directives during the first several years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The trial was previously scheduled to begin in September last year.

Jail records also show Hicks faces three felony counts of battery on a jail custodial officer stemming from an alleged 2023 assault and two felony counts of being a prisoner in possession of a weapon, for which he was arrested in January 2025.